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Washington Post op-ed writer Richard Cohen is concerned that "Climate Change May Be Ruin of Perry Campaign." Far less clear was whether he regards that imminent ruination to be a bad thing, or rather, a cause for celebration. There are excellent reasons to suspect the latter.

Cohen doesn't hold a very high opinion of the Texas governor, of anyone who doesn't buy into the notion of a looming man-made global warming disaster, or of Republicans. Referring to Perry in an Aug. 22 Washington Post article, he opined "It's not his thinking I fear, it's the lack of any at all."

Cohen observed that "[Perry] occupies the cultural and intellectually empty heartland of the Republican party." The article scorned Perry for publicly stating that he stood with an increasing number of scientists who have challenged the existence of man-made global warming threats, commenting "…whoever they (italics noted) might be. In Appleton, Wis., Sen. Joe McCarthy's skeleton rattled a bit." His reference to McCarthy went on to elaborate that "The late and hardly lamented demagogue pioneered the use of the concocted statistic" in suggesting that communists were literally everywhere. He further amplified "There were some, of course, just as there are some scientists who are global warming skeptics, but these few - about 2% of climate researchers - could hold their annual meeting in a phone booth, if there are any left. (Perhaps 2% of scientists think they are)."

This would require a pretty big phone booth, and actually, there really are many of those "global warming skeptics" still remaining. In fact, that number (yes- scientists with solid credentials) has been rapidly multiplying, not diminishing.

Since 2007 more than 31,000 American scientists from diverse climate-related disciplines, including more than 9,000 with Ph.D.s, have signed a public petition announcing their belief that "…there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate." Included are atmospheric physicists, botanists, geologists, oceanographers, and meteorologists.

A 2008 international survey of climate scientists conducted by German scientists Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch revealed deep disagreement concerning two-thirds of the 54 questions asked about their professional views, with responses to about half of those areas skewing on the "skeptic" side and no consensus to support any alarm. The majority did not believe that atmospheric models can deal with important influences of clouds, precipitation, atmospheric convention, ocean convection, or turbulence. Most also did not believe that climate models can predict precipitation, sea level rise, extreme weather events, or temperature values for the next 50 years.

A 2010 survey of media broadcast meteorologists conducted by the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication found that 83% believe global warming is mostly caused by natural, not human, causes. Those polled included members of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and the National Weather Association. Another survey published by the AMS found that only one in four respondents agreed with UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claims that humans are primarily responsible for recent warming.

A literature review of 928 scientific papers published on "global climate change" between 2004 and 2007 that appeared in a 2008 issue of Environment & Energy, reported that 31 (6%) of 591 explicitly or implicitly rejected the idea of consensus that more than half of warming over the past 50 years was likely to have been anthropogenic. Fewer than half endorsed consensus, and only 7% did so explicitly.

Cohen's statement that 97% of all climate scientists believe in anthropogenic global warming can be attributed to a very brief online survey of "over 3,000 Earth scientists" published by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in 2009 that asked "do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?" Not addressed was which human activities any affirmative answer would be linked to, such as: CO2 emissions, and land use changes including agriculture, urbanization and deforestation. Nor was it clear what the question meant by "significant contributing factors" -- whether it was intended to mean that they were statistically measurable, catastrophic, or quite plausibly, even desirable.